The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently announced that ASCON was the winning bid for its Lightweight Cryptography Program. This program was designed to find the best algorithm to protect small Internet of Things (IoT) devices with limited hardware resources. These devices are becoming increasingly popular and are used to store and handle sensitive personal information, such as health data and financial details. As such, it is important to have a standard for encrypting data to ensure security. The weak chips inside these devices require an algorithm that can provide robust encryption with minimal computational power. After four years of research, NIST selected ASCON as the best of the 57 proposals submitted. This algorithm was chosen for its flexibility, energy efficiency, speed on weak hardware, and low overhead for short messages. It also had withstood the test of time, having been developed in 2014 and winning the CAESAR cryptographic competitions Lightweight encryption category in 2019. Two of ASCONs native features are AEAD and hashing. AEAD is an encryption mode that provides confidentiality and authenticity for transmitted or stored data, while hashing is a data integrity verification mechanism. NIST still recommends the AES technique for AEAD and SHA-256 for hashing; however, these are unsuitable for smaller, weaker devices. Despite its lightweight nature, ASCON is powerful enough to offer some resistance to attacks from powerful quantum computers at its standard 128-bit nonce. NIST is also running a separate program for developing quantum-resistant standards, and the effort has already yielded its first results. For more information on ASCON, visit the algorithm's website or read the technical paper submitted to NIST in May 2021.
This Cyber News was published on www.bleepingcomputer.com. Publication date: Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:46:02 +0000